How To Fall In Love With Baseball Again

There was a time in my life when baseball had me by the heart.I once spent an entire summer making a perfectly scaled paper model of Fenway Park. I scored games I watched on TV. I thought the men who appeared in Ken Burns’s Baseball — Daniel Okrent, Donald Hall, Buck O’Neil — represented the highest order of celebrity.

I lost my virginity the night the Toronto Blue Jays won their first World Series — October 27, 1992, if you, like me, were scoring at home — and I have a scar on my head from the night they won their second. Joe Carter hit his home run off Mitch Williams over the left-field wall, and I jumped headfirst into the TV set that was suspended from our dorm room’s ceiling. Hours later, I was still running through the hallways, naked and bloody.

Love, clearly, had turned me into an idiot. Baseball, back then, wasn’t a game or a sport for me. Even passion isn’t a strong enough word. It was part of me, and I was part of it. Baseball might as well have been the ocean.